Nancy Grace - Dont Be a Victim

N ow it seems like another world, a world where I set out to follow my dream of teaching Shakespearean literature. When I studied all of his works in the silence of a library, everything else seemed to disappear. I couldnt think of anything Id rather do, and I planned a lifetime of doing just that.

But that all changed. I remember pushing through the heavy doors of Mercer Universitys math building. I had just finished a statistics exam and after a few more classes, I was heading for a graduate program in Shakespearean studies. It was all right there within my reach, and I distinctly remember thinking as I stepped out of the darkened halls how the world looked so bright and shiny and new outside. I headed across campus to my job in the library, stopping to use a pay phone and let the librarians know I was en route. They gave me the message to call my fiancs sister, Judy.

Right then, I knew.

I kept trying to dial the numbers, but my hand wouldnt cooperate. It was like a moth batting around an outdoor porch light, back and forth in erratic, darting movements. I couldnt quite get the numbers straight. But then, I did. I dont know how I knew, but I knew. I asked her one question: Is Keith gone?

She said yes.

I hung up the phone, and that was the beginning of a dark, hazy blura blur that ended up lasting for years.

Everything was fine, everything was perfect, and then, in a flash, it all changed. Just before our wedding, Keiths world ended. My world exploded.

I grew up in a world where there was nothing but tall pine trees and soybean fields as far as the eye could see, where violence was something unknown and very, very far away. We could ride our bikes anywhere we wanted after school. We could build forts between pine trees and only come home when wed hear chimes in the church steeple telling us it was six oclock and time for supper. I could explore rushing streams and pastures full of cows munching grass and edged with trees. I could swing from a long rope out in a circle over a deep gully full of water, crash-running once I hit the soil when the circle ended. Keiths murder changed all that.

I found out about an alternate universe, a world of violence and unnamed hate. I couldnt eat, couldnt sleep. I couldnt stand to hear music or the TV. My mom had to stop the clocks because I couldnt bear the tick-tick-ticking. I dropped out of school.

Weeks, then months passed. I would sit for days on our front porch in the hot sun. I was fading away mentally and physically. Nothing mattered.

In a last-ditch effort, my parents sent me to visit my sister, who had made it to the Wharton School in Philadelphia. I remember sitting on a bench watching students pouring in and out of the bookstore. They were getting books and supplies to go back to school for fall semester. Back to schoolI knew I could never be happy in a classroom, not anymore. I had to do something, but what? Sitting on that bench outdoors in the late afternoon, I had an inkling of an ideaan inkling that turned into a lifes devotion. Heaven threw me a rope, and even though I didnt realize it at the time, I grabbed it.

Yes, I went back to school, but teaching literature was no longer an option for me. My one burning goal was to somehow get into law school and then fight crime with all my might.

I had only one reference to present to the law school admissions department, from my Sunday school teacher. I remember riding by the law school and seeing the lights burning in the library into the night and wondering if I could possibly get in, wondering if good grades and a letter from a Sunday school teacher could possibly be enough. And then, I got a letter. It was sitting in our black metal mailbox at the end of our driveway near the road, which had finally been paved over just a few years before. The pavement is important because when I opened the letter and read it, I remember the hard asphalt when I went down on my knees and thanked God. I got in.

Before my first day of law school, I actually had to look up the definitions of plaintiff and defendant. It took me seven years before I struck my first jury and tried my first jury trial in inner-city Atlanta, which was at the time one of the murder capitals of the country.

For the next ten years I had a life very different from the way it was before or after. For ten years, an ordinary person like me had an extraordinary opportunity to speak for those who could not speak for themselves and be their voice in courts of law.

Fighting crime is nothing like what you see on TV and in movies. Being on a real murder scene is something I wish on no one. The sight, the smell, the malice hanging in the air is something I never forget. It sticks with you.

Other cases stuck in my heart. I remember a little girl with a hundred pigtails on her head, just three feet tall. She was the victim of repeated rapes by Mommys boyfriend. Turned out he had been molesting young girls for thirty years. I found seven of them and brought similar transactions before the jury when the little girls were too afraid to testify. But they did.

I remember Ms. Leola, the mom of a teen boy gunned down in cold blood over ten dollars, knitting during the trial when testimony was too raw or crime scene photos and bloody clothes were too unsettling for her to look up. But Ms. Leola wouldnt leave, not during witnesses, not during arguments, not during jury selection, not during graphic photos of her son on the autopsy table as the medical examiner testified to mortal wounds. Standing at the jury rail, I looked over at her sitting in the very first row behind me. Ms. Leola would look right back at me, smile and continue knitting, urging me on. She gave me strength, and even the recollection of her renews me.